ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST RECORDING
Incontestably one of the greatest Broadway musicals of all time, My Fair Lady, which opened at the Mark Hellinger on March 15, 1956 and enjoyed a long run of 2,717 performances, set the standards for its perfect integration of the songs and the plot in a smooth amalgamation of music and drama. The work of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who adapted George Bernard Shaw’s whimsical tale of Pygmalion to the musical stage, it starred a non-singing actor, Rex Harrison, another first, and Julie Andrews in her first major role on Broadway. When its producer, Herman Levin, sought to raise the money needed to bring the expensive show to New York, he found in Columbia Records President Goddard Lieberson a tolerant patron of the arts who, single-handedly, provided the $375,000 capitalization, in exchange for the rights in perpetuity to the original cast album. That recording, along with its companion volume in stereo, cut two years later, has always been one of the biggest sellers in the Columbia catalog.